Morris reviewed the novel Looking Backward in the Commonweal on June 21, 1889. In his review, Morris objects to Bellamy’s portrayal of his imagined society as an authority for what socialists believe. Morris writes, 'In short a machine life is the best which Mr. Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not to be wondered at then that this, his only idea for making labor tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery… I believe that this will always be so, and the multiplication of machinery will just multiply machinery; I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men’s energy by the reduction of labor to a minimum, but rather the reduction of pain in labor to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be pain; a dream to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are even more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy’s utopia would allow them to be, but which will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition.'
Morris’s basic antipathy with Bellamy arose chiefly from his disagreement with Bellamy’s social values and aesthetic convictions. While Bellamy favored the urban, Morris favored the pastoral; while Bellamy lauded the Industrial Revolution and the power of the machine, Morris yearned for the restoration of an organic way of life which utilized machines only to alleviate the burdens which humans might find irksome; while Bellamy sought salvation through an omnipotent state, Morris wished to for a time when it would have withered away.
More specifically, Morris criticized the limited nature Bellamy's idea of life. He identifies five concerns - work, technology, centralization, cities, arts - which demonstrates the "half change" advanced in Looking Backward. Morris's review also contains an alternate future society in each of these instances. This was the framework based on which he would later attempt to elaborate his vision of an utopia in News From Nowhere.
Read more about this topic: News From Nowhere